A Stitch in Haste

I almost fell out of my chair:

The Jets and Giants signed an agreement on Thursday to jointly build a stadium complex in the New Jersey Meadowlands, ending the Jets' long and tumultuous attempt to cross the Hudson River, first to a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, then to a park in Queens.

In signing the agreement to share the estimated $800 million cost of construction, the two teams became equal partners in the stadium complex, the first time in the history of the National Football League that two teams have sought to finance and build a stadium together.
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[The Jets] famously enlisted the support of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in a bruising battle to build the world's most expensive stadium, on a platform over railroad tracks on the West Side, but it ended in failure.

No taxpayer money whatsoever is subsiding the new stadium. (The State of New Jersey will, however, provide 20 acres of public land to each team for training facilities.)

So much for the fallacy that a sports stadium specifically, or sports entertainment generally, are "public goods" that require tax subsidies (obnoxiously euphemized by some as a "rooting tax").

As I blogged throughout the West Side Stadium circus, just because something is big does not mean it is a public good. If you (the owner) build it, then you can damn well pay for it. And if you (the fan) use it, then you can damn well pay for it too. Leave taxpayers out of it.

Hopefully voters will remember how utterly unnecessary all the wasteful petty politicking over the West Side Stadium plan was, and that, in the end, it truly was nothing more than a pompous and unnecessary vanity project for Mayor Bloomberg.

Finally, someone in the U.S. is showing a little backbone toward that failed experiment known as the United Nations:

The United States refuses to relinquish its role as the Internet's principal traffic policeman, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting for a U.N. body to take over, a top U.S. official said Thursday.

"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. "Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."

Internet governance has historically been the role of the United States, because it created the original system and funded much of the its early development.

We invented it, we built it, we paid for it. And now the whiners at the U.N. are complaining, not that we shut out moocher governments, not that we don't share enough with them, but that we won't turn the whole thing over to them lock, stock and barrel.

I have a counterproposal — if the U.N. can get China and every other totalitarian regime to abolish all Internet censorship; if it can assure that the Internet will never be taxed by any government (including the United States government), if it can assure that all global standards for the Internet will forever be in English and only in English (comparable to global commercial air travel), then I would gladly support turning over Internet regulation to them.

If the U.N. wants control, then they should earn it first.

It's not as if they deserve any blind faith, given their recent track record in other command-and-control operations.

More thoughts at purple america, WILLisms, Coyote Blog.

Life imitates Michael Crichton:

Arachnaphobes beware -- scientists have found a prehistoric spider perfectly preserved in amber.

Even more worryingly, its blood was preserved, leading to the possibility that its DNA could be extracted.

The creature, 1.5in (4cm) long by 0.78in (2cm) wide, was trapped in the resin 20 million years ago.

No comment yet from either the young-earth creationists or the "intelligent design" disciples.

Suggested Reading:


Carnivalized at Modulator's Friday Ark.

Frederic Sautet has a theory:

I believe indeed that methodology and epistemology are the main reasons why Austrians are not invited and perhaps the reasons why they won't be invited for a long time.
...
Kauder explained that economic laws are ontological and that to be an economist is also to be a metaphysician. Austrians are not alone in claiming that economic laws (as well the laws of mathematics, geometry, etc) are apodictically certain.

I have an alternative explanation: People ignore Austrian economists because they tend to use words like "ontological," "metaphysician" and "apodictically."

Compare and contrast (via Marginal Revolution) this piece from my old graduate adviser from Cornell, Robert Frank (I don't particularly like his economics anymore, but he's 100% correct this time):

The specific assignment is "to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed."

"Your space limit is 500 words," the assignment continues. "Many excellent papers are significantly shorter than that. Please do not lard your essay with complex terminology. Imagine yourself talking to a relative who has never had a course in economics. The best papers are ones that would be clearly intelligible to such a person, and typically these papers do not use any algebra or graphs."

This is comparable to what I call "pitcher and pie" instruction: if I can't explain an economic, financial or legal concept to you over a pitcher of beer and a pizza pie, then I've failed as a teacher. (In one instance, I literally used a pizza pie to explain the concept of EBITDA to a non-Wall-Street friend of a friend. It worked.)

Economists should teach based more on the world and less on the graph, and certainly not on multisyllabic wordplay. Legal instructors get this, I think, far better than economics instructors -- perhaps it's just a by-product of the case method (one exception, however, is all the legal Latin; other than "ceteris paribus" economists tend to speak something resembling English).

Bottom line: There are no bad students...

Senatorial stock gymnastics appear to be bipartisan:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Sen. Jon Corzine [D-NJ] no longer holds shares in Goldman Sachs, his former employer, according to his campaign.

The disclosure regarding Corzine's finances came Tuesday after two lawyers alleged the senator had potential conflicts of interest because the Wall Street firm does business with the state.

In response to media inquiries about the allegations, Corzine spokesman Tom Shea said the senator had directed the trustees of his blind trust to immediately divest Goldman Sachs shares from his portfolio.

The campaign then learned, Shea said, that Corzine's trust had already been divested of the stock.

When that was done is not certain, but it may have been earlier this year, because such a sale was not listed on Corzine's 2004 tax returns.

Okay fine, Corzine seems to have avoided the "good market timing equals bad political timing" conundrum that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fell into. But the underlying dysfunctionality of the whole Congressional stock-trading framework is no less befuddling in Corzine's case:

--Why shouldn't he have been required to fully divest his Goldman Sachs holdings before taking office in the Senate in the first place?

--Alternatively, why doesn't "blind" truly mean blind in the case of Congressional "blind trusts"? What exactly is the logic of allowing senators to give sell orders to (what claims to be) a "blind trust" simply because the investment was owned beforehand? How is this exception to the rules not a potential conflict of interest different from any other buy or sell order?

--As another alternative, why can't members of Congress who face potential investment conflicts be limited instead to "auto-pilot" divestments, comparable to 10b5-1 trading plans for corporate insiders, under which a fixed quantity of the security is sold each month or each quarter regardless of price or corporate news?

--Finally, would it be so onerous to limit politicians to trading in conflict-free investments such as mutual funds and government bonds?

It makes no sense whatsoever that our seniormost politicians have less restrictions on trading than do corporate or Wall Street insiders. They certainly face the same, if not greater, potential conflicts of interest.

They are, most of them, already too power hungry to be trusted. Must they also be allowed every opportunity to satisfy their petty greed as well?

More thoughts from PoliBlog.

Support your local sheriff?

Attacks on Chinese policemen left 23 dead and 1,800 injured in the first half of this year, a Chinese security ministry spokesman has said.

The spokesman told the Beijing Youth Daily such attacks were on the rise.
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Correspondents say disputes between the public and the authorities are increasing over issues such as corruption and land grabs.

China's rapid economic development is widening the gap between rich and poor, and its by-products -- pressure on land and the environment -- is also taking its toll on China's average villager.

As I've blogged previously, people don't riot simply because they're poor. They riot because they're being oppressed.

China's so-called "capitalists" are political elites who rise to prosperity, and power, on the backs of disenfranchised masses, who are lucky even to be peasants, indeed lucky even to be alive, given China's penchant for slave labor and political imprisonment.

If China's totalitarians continue to insist that civil unrest is due to some "gap between rich and poor" gobbledygook, then that will only expose the hypocrisy of their "market communism" all the faster. If the rich are too rich, then why not confiscate their riches, like the communists they profess to be? Simple: because the totalitarians are the rich. And that facade is, as the increasingly frequent riots demonstrate, becoming harder to maintain.

Now that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws, he has "temporarily stepped aside from" his leadership post (though not his seat).

Reports are circulating that House Speaker Dennis Hastert is pushing for DeLay to be replaced by none other than California Representative David Dreier.

I can think of at least one blogger who is going to be very, very upset.

I blogged about Dreier last year.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Reuters is now reporting that House Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri has been elected "interim" Majority leader and will "share duties" with Dreier. One wonders what kind of discussions went on in that closed-door meeting.

Despite a campaign by fans of Ronald Reagan to place his portrait on the new $10 bill, the Treasury has rightly decided to stay with the father of modern America:

The oval borders and fine lines surrounding the portrait of Secretary Hamilton on the face, and the United States Treasury Building vignette on the back, have been removed. The portrait has been moved up and shoulders have been extended into the border. Additional engraving details have been added to the vignette background.

Also:

New symbols of freedom representing icons of Americana are part of the new design series. Two images of the torch carried by the Statue of Liberty are printed in red on the face of the new $10 note. A large image of the torch is printed in the background to the left of the portrait of Secretary Hamilton, while a second, smaller metallic red image of the torch can be found on the lower right side of the portrait. The symbols of freedom differ for each denomination.

"In God We Trust," however, will still appear on the back of the notes.

Meanwhile, if Reaganmania still persists, I would have no problem with putting him on the $20 bill instead. Andrew Jackson does not deserve commemoration.

A school in Omaha, Nebraska, has suspended a first grader for inadvertently bringing a butter knife to class:

Gray, who is 6, said he brought his book bag to school on Monday, but when he set it down, one of his family's butter knives fell out onto the cafeteria floor. A teacher walked up to question him.

Gray told the teacher he wasn't sure how the knife got there. His family thinks his 4-year-old brother, Ben, put it there.

The school now plans to give the boy a one-day in-school suspension as part of its "no tolerance" weapons policy.

"We're going to file suit to prevent that suspension," said the family's attorney, James Martin Davis.
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Law enforcement was contacted in the case. OPS said the boy could have been expelled.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

The bedrock principle of all criminal law is that without both a voluntary act (actus reus) and criminal intent (mens rea), there can simply be no punishable offense. Only the most trivial civil infractions, such as parking tickets, are exempt from the mens rea requirement (with one exception -- statutory rape).

Put aside the question of whether young Master Gray committed an actus reus -- he claims he didn't put the knife in the bag, but let's assume he did. There is still no criminal intent -- no mens rea -- because there can never be mens rea in a child so young.


Juvenile Delinquent?

Every state is different, but generally speaking the age of intent is around seven; I believe that is also the age suggested by the Model Penal Code. Below that age, a child is irrebuttably presumed to be incapable of forming criminal intent. And without criminal intent, there can be no offense. And without an offense, there must be no punishment.

A zero-tolerance weapons policy does not exempt schools from the strictures of either due process or common sense. A six-year old child cannot form criminal intent and must therefore not be punished for any offense or policy violation. The parents should prevail in their challenge of the suspension.

(Via Fark.)

Remember the Los Angeles toddler who was held captive and used, fatally, as a human shield by her father while he shot at police no less than four separate times? The chain of my previous posts on the incident is here.

The family of the toddler are now, perhaps unsurprisingly, preparing to sue the LAPD:

The claims, which were filed late Monday and accuse police of negligence, are a precursor to a civil lawsuit.
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Attorney Leo Carrillo, who is representing Suzie Pena's family, accused police on Monday of not giving negotiators enough time to try to talk the father into surrendering. He also accused officers of recklessly using a flash-bang grenade.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Negligence is the breaching of a duty of care owed to another. Another common definition is "the doing of something a reasonably prudent person would not do, or the failure to do something a reasonably prudent person would do, under the same or similar circumstances."

In this instance, as I explained in my previous posts, when one speaks of a "reasonably prudent person," one must of course be limited to a reasonably prudent police officer facing live armed combat. How is a lay jury supposed to determine what is reasonable when you're being shot at? It is folly to suppose that a lay civilian jury is competent to pass judgment on police officers in the context of armed combat.

Of course, the only standard of reasonableness in this circumstance is: "if you're being shot at, then it is reasonable to shoot back." Unless experts, particularly as part of an internal investigation, can objectively demonstrate otherwise, there simply cannot be an actionable claim in a fact pattern like this.

We rarely if ever second-guess our soldiers in matters of live armed combat. Law enforcement officers, in live armed combat, deserve the same presumptions and insulations from liability. If they're shooting at you, then it is per se reasonable to shoot back. No civilian has the right to say otherwise.

The father proximately caused the death of his daughter, not the police, and the police must not be held liable.

Overlawyered has more background on the litigation.

And you thought Kelo was bad:

According to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 300,000 people have to date been evicted from their homes in Beijing in preparation for the Games. Many of them have been evicted without due process and without adequate compensation. Individuals have been arrested and imprisoned simply for peacefully objecting to the evictions from their homes. Some of those detained have "disappeared" — their relatives do not even know where they are being held.

Shame on any freedom-loving person who legitimizes China's totalitarian regime by participating in, attending, or even watching the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Wait for London.

Highlights from last night's season premiere of "Boston Legal" --

--giving testimony by cello

--"My god, it doesn't muss!"

Yeah right, real Emmy material.

Oh what I wouldn't give for a decent law drama...

First Philadelphia, now Chicago:

Eleven priests suspected of sexual misconduct with minors more than 20 years ago have been barred from clerical work, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago said Monday.

The men cannot present themselves as priests, engage in public ministries or act as an agent of the archdiocese, although they have not been removed from the priesthood, said Chancellor Jimmy Lago.
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The statue [sic] of limitations has expired in all the cases, officials said.
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"I think that this begrudging, long overdue action ... does not relieve Cardinal George of his responsibility," said Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "There's 11 known child molesters out there that are not going to be found on any sex offender registries."

Maybe the answer is to eliminate the statute of limitations for child molestation. In First Amendment law, child pornography is considered "just different" and receives no constitutional protection, none whatsoever. There's generally no statute of limitations for murder, and some jurisdictions are even eliminating the statute of limitations for sex crimes whenever DNA evidence is available indefinitely.

So why not say what we're already saying in another context: that child molestation is sui generis and allow authorities to go after pervert priests and other molesters no matter how long it takes to discover their identities?

Maybe that, along with another billion dollars or so of judgments and settlements — might finally get the church bureaucracy's attention.

Remember the Byrd Amendment, 19 U.S.C. 1671, §754? It's a bizarre anti-free-trade law that not only slaps counterproductive tariffs on goods from countries deemed to be "unfairly competing" with American businesses, but actually gives the money raised from those tariffs to the companies in the affected industries. These companies are in essence collecting their own private tax.

Over a year ago the World Trade Organization ruled that the Byrd Amendment was a violation of international trade rules and authorized retaliatory sanctions by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Mexico and other nations.

So, for American consumers, the Byrd Amendment:

--raised the prices of imported goods in the affected industries as a result of the tariffs;

--raised the prices of domestic goods in the affected industries as a result of reduced competition;

--propped up inefficient industries, to the detriment of the economy as a whole;

--hurt efficient industries that were successfully competing in global markets, as a result of the retaliatory tariffs.

Great going, Senator Byrd.

In any event, the Government Accountability Office has released a study of which industries are receiving all that Byrd Amendment tariff money, totaling $1 billion over four years:

Two-thirds of that money went to three industries — ball bearings, candles and steel. Nearly half of the $1 billion in payments went to just five companies.

The Timken Co. of Canton, Ohio, was the largest recipient, receiving $205 million. The other four big recipients were the Torrington Co., $135 million; Candle-lite, $57 million; MPB Corp., $55 million; and Zenith Electronics Corp., $33 million.

Candles? The candle industry is vital to America's economic vitality or national security?

But wait, there's more:

The former chairman of the board of Timken, William R. Timken Jr., was a major contributor to President Bush's re-election campaign and served as finance co-chairman for his campaign in Ohio, the state that gave Bush his margin of victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry. Bush appointed Timken the U.S. ambassador to Germany in July.

I think the political expression for this is "quid pro ball bearing."

So is this good news or bad news? On the one hand, the deadweight loss and disruption to market dynamism from the Byrd Amendment was "only" $1 billion over four years. On the other hand, the brazen specificity of the awards and the political give-and-take are rather nauseating. As the saying goes: great subsidy if you can get it.

In any event, it appears that support in Congress for repealing the Byrd Amendment is growing, but still inadequate to succeed.

Keep all this in mind the next time you're shopping for candles.

---

Meanwhile, Senator Byrd has announced that he will seek an unprecedented ninth term in the Senate in 2006. Byrd is 87 years old.

The BBC:

China carried out at least 3,400 executions last year, according to rights group Amnesty International.

That is more than was carried out by all other countries combined, AI says.
...
At the moment, Chinese citizens can be sentenced to death for crimes such as corruption and robbery, but there is a debate under way over whether those who commit non-violent crimes should be exempt.
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The Chinese media has given widespread coverage to two wrongful convictions this year -- a butcher executed for murder in 1989 was proved innocent when his alleged victim was found alive, and a man was freed after 11 years in jail when his wife, whom he was accused of killing, was also found alive.

Amnesty International in fact believes the 3,400 number to vastly underreported, with the actual number possibly close to 10,000. The United States executed 59 people in 2004, and some consider us barbarians just for having that many.

I'm not unconditionally opposed to the death penalty; neither am I opposed to considering foreign law in helping to define "cruel and unusual punishment." But I do think that people who are executed should: (a) actually be guilty, of (b) something more heinous than robbery.

If we're uncivilized for just having the death penalty, then what is China, with its "capital punishment on steroids" policy?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is defending his well-timed sale of HCA stock on the grounds that it was meant to prevent future conflicts of interest should he run for president in 2008:

"The complaints and questions have persisted," Frist said yesterday. "Because of these continuing questions, and looking ahead at my final years in the Senate and what might come next, I have for some time wanted to eliminate even the possibility of an appearance of a conflict by totally divesting of any HCA stock in my family's trust."
...
"In April, I asked my staff to determine if Senate rules and relevant laws would allow me to direct the trustees to sell any remaining HCA stock. In May, my staff worked with outside counsel and with the Senate ethics committee staff to draft a written communication to the trustees. After obtaining pre-approval by mid-June from the Senate ethics committee, I issued a letter directing my trustees to sell any remaining HCA stock in my family's trust."

This is all well and good, and I still see no reason to jump to conclusions about whether Frist had material nonpublic information about HCA's earnings. But it fails to address the systemic deficiencies in the Senate's ethics rules that this incident has exposed:

--How can a "blind trust" allow for directed transactions, under any circumstances? How can "blind" not mean blind?

--Why is it a conflict for Frist to hold equities in a blind trust as president, or as a presidential candidate, but not "merely" as Senate majority leader? Why is it a "potential conflict" for Frist to own HCA stock in 2005, 2006 or 2007 but not in 2004 or 2003 or December 2002, when he was elected majority leader?

--If the goal of the sale was merely to remove potential conflicts, then why not structure a slow, steady sale of the stock over time, comparable to the 10b5-1 trading plans now available to corporate insiders so they can avoid timing conflicts?

--Why should members of Congress be allowed to trade corporate securities at all? Wouldn't the best way to avoid conflicts be to freeze all trading activity during their time in office, or limit them to conflict-free investments such as mutual funds and government bonds, as much of Wall Street does?

I say again: If Frist played by the rules, then the rules are a ass.

More thoughts at PoliBlog.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear three cases challenging the constitutionality of a Vermont law capping campaign expenditures by candidates, a law expressly contrary to the Court's ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976). Buckley held that, at least for federal elections, limits on campaign contributions to candidates were constitutional, but limits on campaign expenditures by candidates are a violation of the First Amendment. One would think, since the First Amendment has been been fully incorporated to apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, that a state limit on a candidate's expenditures must also be a First Amendment violation.

In any event, wouldn't it be grand if the Court used this opportunity to revisit and reverse the schizophrenic holding of Buckley and rule that people have a unlimited First Amendment right to spend their money as they see fit?

Buckley may be the most bizarre Supreme Court case I've ever read. Why exactly does it make sense to say that Mike Bloomberg can spend $70 million to get re-elected mayor of New York, but I can't spend $70,000 to oppose him (unless I run for mayor myself)? Money used to buy a campaign ad is either speech or it isn't — who's spending the money is utterly irrelevant. A campaign ad is a campaign ad — how can it matter who paid for it?

To the extent "who paid for it" does matter, that can be addressed by disclosure rules. They might not be as "free society" as libertarians might like, but they're certainly better than outright limits.

Furthermore, how can a limit on campaign contributions make sense within the context of the First Amendment? Money is homogeneous — how can some of it be permissible and some of it not? In other words, how can the one thousandth dollar I spend be a valid exercise of my First Amendment rights, but the one thousand first dollar not be? Such a doctrine is unforgivably nonsensical.

That part of Buckley v. Valeo that upheld limits on campaign contributions was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

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One of the reasons Buckley v. Valeo is such a bizarre and self-contradictory opinion is because it apparently was a "split the baby" decision. The ruling was per curiam, but five different justices wrote separate decisions "concurring in part and dissenting in part." Rather than debate endlessly about whether "money is speech" either always or never, they opted instead for a nonsensical "sometimes." That is not the kind of legal reasoning that is entitled to stare decisis.

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The lead case is Vermont Republican State Committee v. Sorrell, No. 04-1530. Links and a good background discussion are available from Election Law Blog. More thoughts at Rossputin.

...how is it that not a single tribute to the late Don Adams has yet mentioned Tennessee Tuxedo?

Tennessee Tuxedo was introduced on CBS-TV in response to the 1961 speech by FCC Chairman Newton R. Minow which addressed television as a "vast wasteland". Tennessee, voiced by comedian Don Adams (who portrayed Maxwell Smart on Get Smart, and later voiced Inspector Gadget), educated as well as entertained youngsters.

Tennessee Tuxedo was the original gay penguin. A bachelor whose "roommate" was a large furry bear walrus named Chumley and who enjoyed repeated secret rendevous with an eccentric old dandy named Phineas J. Whoopee -- you just know he lived an alternative penguin lifestyle!



Tennessee was also, like so many enlightened gays, an equal rights activist:

They were constantly scheming against zookeeper Stanley Livingston (voiced by Mort Marshall) and his assistant Flunky (voiced by Kenny Delmar), in an attempt to raise the quality of zoo-life.

A true role model for generations of gay penguins and their admirers.

Don Adams, R.I.P.

I am adding Where the Dolphins Play to the Elite Eleven. Dolphin is the first self-described liberal on the Eleven, but if you review his recent post, "Why I'm a Liberal," I think it's clear that he's more libertarian than he might realize.

Dolphin replaces Fly Bottle.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: The fact that A Stitch in Haste is one of Dolphin's seven "Daily Reads" had nothing to do with this decision. Really. Honest. No, really. Why are you looking at me like that?)

What is "The Elite Eleven"?

My Blogrolling Policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that its Chairman, Christopher Cox, will recuse himself from the regulatory agency's investigation into the sale of $112 million of stock by the supposedly "blind trust" of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist:

"Because of my service in the congressional leadership for the last 10 years, I have recused myself in this matter," he said.
...
"The purpose of the recusal is to avoid any appearance of impropriety in the commission's consideration of this case," said Cox...

Here's the interesting thing: before Cox ran for Congress, he was a long-time Wall Street lawyer — a venture capital specialist with Latham & Watkins.

Funny how we Wall Streeters "just get it" when it comes to conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, while people hailing from "nobler" professions such as medicine apparently don't.

Remind me again how we Wall Streeters are all greedy, unethical parasites?

Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed that one week after the New York Times introduced its ludicrous "TimesSelect" subscription service for online access to its op-ed pages, no less than three of the now-walled-off columnists appeared on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday:

The joint Meet appearance by three NYT columnists seemed like a marketing gimmick. (Next they're going to be given away to audience members on Oprah!) But it may also have been a desperate plea for attention on their part (now that they've been sent down the TimesSelect memory hole on the Web)...

I still think TimesSelect will be abandoned far sooner than anyone is willing to predict -- are those online market betting services offering a pool?

---

Kaus also agrees with me about something mind-bogglingly stupid Tom Friedman said during that panel discussion:

I think we have -- we are now in a position where China has -- they're heading for $1 trillion, OK, of our -- in reserves that they're going to be holding, basically. And the leverage that is going to give China over the United States in the coming years, God knows where -- how that's going to play out.

This is quite simple: if the Chinese government is so limitlessly retarded as to loan us money at ridiculously low interest rates -- then let them! If they try to dump the treasury securities later, then they will do so at a loss, potentially a huge loss, which is the same as writing us a big fat check. I would love nothing more (well, I'd love balanced budgets more, but that has nothing to do with us taking advantage of China's economic illiteracy).

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Finally, if you missed the side-splitting humor of pre-eminent local hack politician Aaron "Crocodile Tears" Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in Louisiana, who captured the nation on a previous edition of MTP with his gripping, emotive -- and patently false -- tale of a elderly woman left to die in a nursing home due to federal (as opposed to local) incompetence, well, it makes Zell Miller look like a eunuch. MSNBC has the video.

There is much self-congratulatory back-slapping over at the Group of Eight over their finalization of a $55 billion global welfare program to heavily indebted nations.

The only problem is that there's not much discussion of how these "unfortunate" nations got to be so heavily indebted in the first place, or what plans are in place to keep them from becoming heavily indebted in the future:

The exact criteria remained unclear on Saturday, though [U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon] Brown said it was based on a nation's per capita income. In addition to being poor, however, a government has to follow "sound" economic policies and meet standards for good governance.

Yeah right, good luck with that. Most of the deadbeat nations are in Africa, and if there are two thing Africa knows nothing about, it's sound economic policies and good governance.

There's nothing wrong with debt forgiveness, either privately or globally, if you get something in exchange for it. How about requiring the implementation of a system of enforceable property rights? Or constitutionally-imposed equal rights for women? Or an unlimited right of emigration? Or maximum taxation rates? Or universal elementary education? Or respect for intellectual property? Or allowing unfettered inspection privileges to human rights groups? Or privatizing all state-owned media?

Small prices to pay for several billions of dollars in debt relief. Still, I somehow suspect that the G-8 would consider such rules "oppressive" and will attach few if any strings to the multi-billion dollar handouts.

The more things change...

Feel free to make as much money as you want in China's so-called "capitalism zones," just don't tell anybody about it:

A Chinese court has convicted an online journalist on subversion charges and sentenced him to seven years in prison — the third such case this year, a court official and a reporters' advocacy group said Friday.

Zheng Yichun was convicted on Thursday said an official at the Intermediate People's Court in Yingkou, a port city in northeastern China's Liaoning province. The official, who would give only his surname, Ma, said he was not able to give any details.
...
Although China's leaders encourage the use of the Internet for business and education, authorities use vaguely defined secrecy and subversion laws to silence critics and perceived political opponents.

And please no false analogies to Judith Miller. She is in jail not for anything she said or wrote, but for contempt of court. And we don't get information about her status from prosecutors or judges who only give their first names.

This is naked, brazen censorship and a flagrant human rights violation. And the Chinese are really good at it — Reporters Without Borders describes China as the "World Champion" of Internet censorship.

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Meanwhile, China has decided that these "one subversive at a time" imprisonments are just too clumsy and inefficient for a modern dictatorship, so they're opting instead for a more "economies of scale" approach:

China said Sunday it is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites and will allow the posting of only "healthy and civilized" news.
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The subjects that would be acceptable under those categories was not clear. ... "The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest," [the official Xinhua News Agency] added.
...
Authorities in Shanghai have installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Internet cafes to register with their official identity cards.

Shanghai, meanwhile, is one of those token "market zones" that are supposedly part of China's "economic miracle." With miracles like this, who needs a curse?

China and its apologists like to pretend that China's "market communism" is just another form of true capitalism. Well, what might a capitalist call this crackdown on all newsflow?

Oh right — "wholesale" censorship.

Other thoughts at Samizdata, Daniel Drezner.

I went to Carnegie Hall last night to see Lewis Black, the funniest man in America and the most important comic since George Carlin. He was, as always, awesome.

There were two opening acts for Black: a very good older comic named John Bowman, and an atrocious new-age techno-"music" poser composer named Jane Ira Bloom, who screeched meaningless strings of almost-notes on a soprano sax while tapping out cacophonous counter-noise on a footpad synthesizer reminiscent of the F.A.O. Schwartz scene in "Big." I simply cannot adequately describe how utterly awful she was.

So why am I blogging about it? Because of this line in her Playbill biography:

She was the first musician ever commissioned by the NASA Art Program...

NASA Art Program?!? We need a "space art" program? This is somehow part of NASA's mission — not to contribute to scientific knowledge, advance new technologies or aid in national defense, but to make "space noise"?

Remind me again how there's "no fat left in the federal budget"?

And does this mean that the National Endowment for the Arts will be launching its own satellites?

So if you're at all tempted to think that the ludicrous NASA proposal to spend $104 billion on a "Been There, Done That" warm fuzzy feeling Moondoggle, think about how NASA has been spending its your money recently.

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Meanwhile, here are the various government bodies that took tax money from people who did not see Lewis Black in order to make tickets cheaper for those who did see Lewis Black. Because Carnegie Hall generally and Lewis Black specifically are apparently "public goods" and some "smarter than you" bureaucrats decided that subsidizing a well-off Manhattan investment banker seeing a potty-mouth comic was a worthy use of your tax dollars.

--City of New York
--State of New York
--NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
--New York State Council on the Arts
--New York City Council
--National Endowment for the Arts
--U.S. Department of Education
--U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
--U.S. Department of State

I love that last one — I guess U.N. ambassadors wanted to see Lewis Black too.

I've significantly updated my blogroll, removing several inactive or otherwise marginal blogs. I've also partitioned the Gay category into "Gay (Political)" and "Gay (Social)."

As always, if you're on my blogroll and don't like the category I've assigned you, just let me know.

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You might also notice that there's a vacancy on "The Elite Eleven." I'm still considering candidates to fill the opening. Suggestions welcome, either in the comments or by email.

Blogrolling Policy

Over at my greedy Swiss bank employer, I'm what's known as a "Permanent Insider." That means that I have access to the list of securities issuers about which my firm possesses "material nonpublic information," commonly known as "inside information." I often don't even know what the information actually is, just that the firm possesses it. I am said to sit "above the Information Barrier," once known as "striding the Chinese Wall."

Unsurprisingly, my firm (and regulators) would be very upset if I used this information to my own advantage by trading securities on these confidential lists. The practice is expressly forbidden under any circumstances.

What's more, I'm significantly constrained in all securities transactions, even for companies about which the firm has no inside information. If I want to engage in even a harmless, innocent stock trade, I need no less than four different approvals, from my immediate supervisor to the head of the investment banking division.

As you can imagine, I don't trade much.

Which is why the reports of Senate Majority Frist selling $112 million worth of stock in the company his family founded, Hospital Corporation of America ("HCA"), is an unambiguous scandal.

Let's be very clear about this: It is totally irrelevant whether Frist actually had any material nonpublic information about HCA's earnings. This is not "Martha Stewart — The Sequel." Any transaction, regardless of whether it was based on inside information, is flagrantly unethical.

A blind trust should be exactly that — blind. Any member of Congress, indeed any Congressional staffer, should be expressly prohibited from any and all private securities transactions.

This proscription becomes even more imperative with the leadership. The influence of Congressional leaders, including committee chairs, is so extreme as to make the need for a trading barrier similar to what we Wall Street insiders face self-apparent. Or so one would think.

Frist is now claiming that he ordered the stock sale to "avoid the appearance of a conflict." Huh? The whole point of a blind trust is to provide that "appearance of impropriety" insulation — piercing the blind trust by ordering the HCA sale was the quickest way to create the appearance of a conflict. Frist, and his advisers, are either liars or idiots.

The time to sell your holdings is when you first enter politics. If you have to do it at a loss, then too bad so sad — stay out of politics if you don't like it. Either that, or have your trustee work around the constraint while you remain in the dark. There are many ways to do this — build up the portfolio around the concentrated holding, or utilize a controlled, fixed periodic liquidation like corporate insiders do (called a "10b5-1 trading plan").

Politicians, bureaucrats and the legions of minions who prop them up claim to be driven by the desire to be "public servants." If greed and power-lust are not their goals, then what's the big deal about trading restrictions? Why can't blind mean blind?

And if they insist on managing their own finances rather than using blind trusts, fine. Let them do what we do on Wall Street — buy mutual funds or Treasury bonds while avoiding direct ownership of stocks, options or corporate bonds, which can create potential conflicts.

Meanwhile, the SEC and federal prosecutors have launched an investigation of HCA and subpoenaed their records relating to Frist. Good, but I want to repeat and emphasize that I am not saying that Frist engaged in insider trading — I would hope he's too smart for that (on the other hand...). My point is that even an innocent breach of the blind trust was inappropriate and should not have been allowed. Blind should mean blind.

Apparently the stock sale itself, absent any potential insider trading, is allowed by Senate rules. If so, then the Senate rules are a ass. The Senate has been described as a "Millionaires' Club." That doesn't mean it has to be a "Petty, Selfish, Greedy Millionaires' Club."

Congressional ethics rules must be amended to prevent any and all trading in corporate securities and derivatives by all Members of Congress and their senior staff. Similar prohibitions should of course extend to all senior members of government, at both the federal and state level.

It's a small price to pay for the privilege of being a "public servant."

Other thoughts at De Novo, In Dicta, FaerieWizard.

If you ever find yourself in a freedom-deprived country, then be sure to smuggle in the handy "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents," by the public interest group Reporters Without Borders.

The 46-page handbook contains an overview of blogging generally, as well as tips on how to blog anonymously, blog security, blogging internationally, testimonials about suppression of bloggers around the world and a summary of the worst Internet censors (the "World Champion" of which, as RWB calls it, is of course China).

And may you never see the violence inherent in the system...

Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
--James 3:1

Remind me again how it's "all about the children"?

A 14-year-old student was expelled from a Christian school because her parents are lesbians, the school's superintendent said in a letter.

Shay Clark was expelled from Ontario Christian School [in California] on Thursday.

"Your family does not meet the policies of admission," Superintendent Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, the girl's biological mother.

Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship," The Los Angeles Times reported in Friday's edition.
...
Clark and her partner have been together 22 years and have two other daughters, ages 9 and 19.

So now spreading the gospel of anti-gay hatred is so vitally important that a little collateral damage in the form of expelled straight children is acceptable under current Christian doctrine?

That's a mighty bizarre expression of God's love.

I actually feel more sorry for the kids who are not being expelled from a school like this. Lord only knows what other expressions of "Christian virtue" they're being taught in that school.

Remind me again why local hack politicians are so much better than "activist" judges?

Two aldermen [in White House, Tennessee] say league and tournament games should be banned in the municipal park on Sunday mornings for religious reasons.

Alderman Darrell Leftwich wants organized games in White House Municipal Park to be restricted to the 1-4:30 p.m. period on Sundays.

"I am concerned that we are not sending the right message to the community by having tournaments and league play during worship hours," Leftwich said.
...
"God our Father intended the seventh day to be one of rest and worship," Leftwich said during a recent city board meeting.
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Alderman Farris Bibb Jr. said the city should look into the matter further. "With all due respect to Alderman Leftwich, the seventh day of the week is Saturday," Bibb said.

Talk about "God in the public square."

Even if you argue that closing a park on Sunday mornings is a content-neutral restriction that does not "establish" a government religion, such a ban still fails rational basis review: There is no legitimate state interest in telling an atheist, or Jew, or Buddhist or any other non-Christian, that he can't use a park on Sunday mornings because it offends the Christians down the street.

Alcohol restrictions, sure. Noise restrictions, sure. Unleashed dog restrictions, sure. But "no nuttin' never" restrictions to stroke the (supposedly) Christian egos of some local hack politicians?

I believe the "What would Jesus do?" response is found at Mark 10:14.

Hat tip to Fark.

I think we already know how Justice Antonin Scalia is going to vote on Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the pending case challenging the Solomon Amendment:

The government can decide what artwork is worthwhile without being accused of censorship as long as it is funding that art, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience Thursday at the Juilliard School.

"The First Amendment has not repealed the ancient rule of life, that he who pays the piper calls the tune," Scalia said.

The justice, who limited his discussion to art issues, said he wasn't suggesting that government stop funding the arts, but that if it does fund artwork, it is entitled to have a say in the content, just like when it runs a school system.

But of course government isn't paying the piper -- taxpayers are. So the analogy is invalid. It's comparable to arguing that a couple getting married not only has the right to hire the band and choose the playlist, but also has the right to force you to attend and buy them a gift.

Oh, and I don't see "fund the arts" anywhere among the enumerated powers. The Spending Clause doesn't count, because it requires spending for the general welfare, not the limited welfare of politically favored artists in politically favored disciplines in politically favored locales.

Spending for the arts is the purest expression of the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling. The fact that every public dollar spent on "the arts" is really a taxpayer dollar spent on "the arts," against his wishes, means nothing. The fact that every public dollar spent on "the arts" is really a dollar spent on an artist, based on the subjective whim of bureaucrats deemed to have "superior tastes" or "higher knowledge" than the art market itself, means nothing (the simple truth is that the reason there are so many "starving artists" is because most artists suck). The fact that art is simply not a public good (i.e., it can be privately owned), means nothing. Someone "smarter than you" thinks otherwise -- now pay up.

Government funding for the arts is anti-capitalist, anti-American central planning. It may not be a lot of central planning; it may not be an especially dangerous form of central planning. But it is central planning nonetheless.

And that makes it just plain wrong. Which means that Scalia is also just plain wrong.

Perhaps in response to the Porkbusters project, the AFL-CIO is insisting that government spending not be cut in order to pay for Katrina relief:

Labor leaders said Thursday they would work to defeat any efforts to pay for rebuilding the Gulf Coast by cutting important federal programs.

And union leaders in the AFL-CIO cautioned against further tax cuts while the government is paying for a war in Iraq and recovery from Hurricane Katrina -- with another hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast.
...
"If they are going to push for another tax cut for the wealthy and for corporations, we're going to be out there against it," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. "I think our country would be in better financial shape if we had worked with the surplus we had and not given tax breaks to those who don't need it."
...
AFL-CIO unions have donated more than $10 million to relief efforts, are setting up worker centers throughout the region and are sending teams to help survivors. The labor federation is pushing to restore federal rules that set wages for workers on federal contracts while encouraging the hiring of local firms to do the rebuilding.

Of course, one wonders where the AFL-CIO gets $10 million with which to be so generous to Katrina victims -- the organization is not exactly a charity. Oh, right -- union dues extracted from involuntary members by force of law.

One also wonders who's going to create all those jobs that the AFL-CIO thinks should be made available to Katrina victims, if not the "wealthy and corporations." Those who truly care about workers displaced by the hurricanes ought to be championing as much tax relief for employers as possible.

Or is the AFL-CIO suggesting that every unemployed Southerner now be employed by the government? Is that a plan for long-term economic success, regionally or nationally?

The AFL-CIO has repeatedly made their position plain: They would rather see people unemployed at a "prevailing wage" than employed at a lower wage. They would rather see people unemployed than employed but not in a union. Their relentless opposition to Wal-Mart is just one example.

The worst possible course of action, if you truly care about working-class Americans, is to scare away business from the region. Obsolete union histrionics certainly fall into that category.

The New Jersey Attorney General has announced a county-by-county investigation into fraudulent voting, including thousands of votes cast by dead people and thousands more cases of multiple votes, including by people in multiple states (i.e., so-called "snowbird voters"):

More than 6,500 voters cast ballots in New Jersey and another state in last November's election, while 4,755 ballots were cast by deceased voters, according to Republican State Committee Chairman Tom Wilson.

In addition, 54,601 people are registered to vote in two New Jersey counties, and 4,397 of them cast ballots in both places last fall, Wilson said.

Make no mistake about it -- this is intentional voter fraud. It can be eliminated trivially with three simple changes, all of which were included in the recent report of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform:

1. Require photo ID, preferably government voter ID, to vote in person. To avoid the "poll tax" fallacy currently being perpetrated by opponents of Georgia's new voter ID law, allow anyone without a satisfactory ID to acquire one for free.

2. Move to statewide voter registration to avoid cross-county voting within a state.

3. Allow states to compare voter registration rolls to eliminate snowbird voting.

Not one valid vote would be disturbed by any of these three simple rules. Many, if not most, invalid votes would be.

I vote "yea," not to mention "yay!"

Or should that be: "Regulation of Political News Back in the Blogs"?

Political bloggers who offer diverse views on Republicans and Democrats, war and peace argued on Thursday that they should be free of government regulation.

The notion was echoed by some members of the government agency trying to write rules covering the Internet's reach in political campaigns.

Amid the explosion of political activity on the Internet, a federal court has instructed the six-member Federal Election Commission to draw up regulations that would extend the nation's campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.

The FEC, in its initial rules, had exempted the Internet.

This is very easy:

--McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court be damned. Likewise, Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), which upheld limits on campaign contributions, was wrongly decided.

--Putting that aside, even under McCain-Feingold, that which is free of money should be free of regulation. A blogger who pays no money to a campaign should be free to blog without any governmental interference whatsoever.

--Likewise, a blogger who receives no money from a campaign should be similarly free of all regulatory scrutiny.

--As for bloggers who give money or money's worth (note: a favorable blogpost is not "money's worth"), they should simply be subject to the same disclosure rules as any other campaign contributor; the fact that a contributor is also a blogger should mean absolutely nothing.

--Meanwhile, bloggers who receive money from candidates (e.g., through blogads, PayPal donations and the like) should still be exempt from any disclosure requirements -- those should apply to the campaign, not the blogger.

There are already enough "follow the money" regulations, registration requirements and limits, both on contributers and campaigns, to make the incremental fact that a blog may be involved utterly irrelevant. The FEC, not to mention Congress, should just acknowledge that once and for all and move on.

Did I mention that McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court be damned?

Sony, which was Apple before Apple was Apple, is admitting defeat and radically downsizing its operations:

Electronics giant Sony has announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide as part of a restructuring programme. ... The company will also close or sell 11 of its 65 manufacturing plants.
...
The company that invented the Walkman has been humbled in the portable music market by Apple's iPod, while it has also been caught out by the shift from traditional cathode-ray tube televisions to flat screens.

Critics of capitalism often focus on company size, arguing something like, "For capitalism to work, it requires competition, and mega-corporations like Microsoft, Wal-Mart and, um, Sony don't really compete, because they're practically monopolies."

Nonsense. Indeed the exact opposite proves to be true almost without exception: it takes remarkably few competitors to bring about competition. Sony has only a handful of competitors to the Walkman and old-fashioned television businesses. And those handful of competitors cleaned Sony's clock-radio.

Sony gave us great Walkmans and Discmans. But it didn't give us great iPods. And all its size and market power couldn't help it compete with a better product — a better product that only capitalism and the profit motive could give us.

In a centrally-planned economy, however, where economics and politics are intertwined, there would have been no incentive to invent, or perfect, the MP3 player. And even if it had been invented, the political power (not the economic power) of an entrenched producer like Sony would have been able to keep it off the market. Or perhaps the mere subjective whim of some bureaucrat would have been enough: "We have a perfectly good Walkman factory — why displace all those workers just to go from a dozen songs to 10,000?"

All variations of central planning presume static markets: that nothing ever changes and that entrepreneurship and risk taking are merely "exploitation."

And the format of that old song is incompatible with your iPod.

There's an old saying that, in order to exercise freedom of the press, it must be legal to actually own a press.

In order words, you can't have political freedom without economic freedom, nor can you have economic freedom without political freedom.

So stop trying to convince me that China is "capitalist" --

China on Thursday rejected a U.S. call to adopt democracy, telling Washington to respect its communist path and brushing off warnings of retaliation for its huge trade surplus with the United States.
...
"The internal affairs should be handled by the government and people of each country," [Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang] said. "We should respect another country's right to chose its own development road."

And if that "right to chose its own development road" includes forced abortions, torture, censorship, slave labor, invading peaceful neighbors, or any of the myriad other atrocities committed -- with unapologetic pride -- by these so-called "market communists," then we should just shrug and focus on the handful of "neat-o" new cities built along a tiny sliver of China's coastline that are mostly accessible only to politically favored elites?

Communist is as Communist does. That will never ever change, and that will never ever be a good thing.

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Meanwhile, China itself is starting to acknowledge that its "market communism" isn't quite the Great Leap Forward it previously claimed it was:

China's official media warned Wednesday that the gap between rich and poor has become alarmingly wide during two decades of economic liberalization, contributing to spreading unrest in towns and villages across the country.
...
Riots and other violent protests, which the government acknowledges are increasing dramatically, have become a major issue for President Hu Jintao's government. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao have made calls for "harmonious society" and "social stability" watchwords of their speeches over the last year.

The reports on income inequality seemed to attribute violence to economic rather than political causes and warned that more unrest could be coming.

Nonsense. In a free society people don't riot simply because they're poor. For the most part they don't riot at all. And when they do it's because they feel, not impoverished, but oppressed.

In any case, it's a mighty bizarre form of "economic miracle" that results in mass rioting.

The ultimate expression of failed redistributionist economic theory, the International Monetary Fund, is pooh-poohing the Bush Administration's stated intent of halving the U.S. federal budget deficit in half by the end of the President's term.

Instead, and unsurprisingly, the IMF prefers a wide panoply of new taxes of every ilk:

As an alternative, the IMF recommended that the United States consider raising taxes through such methods as eliminating some current tax deductions, creating a national consumption tax or a new energy tax, all ideas that run counter to President Bush's tax-cutting goals.

Of course, the question of how realistic any deficit reduction forecasts are, now that we have the dual propositions of "whatever it takes" Katrinanomics and "there is no fat left" DeLayonomics, is totally valid when condemning the current fiscal policy of the tax-and-spend Republicans in Congress and the White House. But that is not the same as saying that we should engage in taxation carpet-bombing, not only hiking every tax already on the books but also crafting new ones like a national consumption tax.

As the Porkbusters project irrefutably demonstrates, there is a third way: reduce government spending. Reduce it dramatically. Surely the nation can do with a few less "bridges to nowhere" and obsolete moonshots in order to get our fiscal house in order.

It's the first rule of debating: both sides can be wrong. Such is the case with the Hobson's Choice of "higher taxes or higher deficits."

Technorati Tag: porkbusters

It's hard to partake of China's supposed "economic miracle" when you're busy being subjected to forced criminal confessions:

For three days and three nights, the police wrenched Qin Yanhong's arms high above his back, jammed his knees into a sharp metal frame, and kicked his gut whenever he fell asleep. The pain was so intense that he watched sweat pour off his face and form puddles on the floor.

On the fourth day, he broke down. "What color were her pants?" they demanded. "Black," he gasped, and felt a whack on the back of his head. "Red," he cried, and got another punch. "Blue," he ventured. The beating stopped.

Read the whole thing.

In the former Soviet Union, only something like 15% of the population were actually allowed the (literal) privilege of joining the Communist Party. Now matter how dismal economic conditions got as the "superpower" slouched toward eventual collapse, members of the Party never wanted for anything. That didn't mean, however, that the Soviet Union was any kind of "economic miracle."

The supposed "new capitalism" tolerated out of desperation along a tiny sliver of China's coastline differs only in the percentages and the format of the charade presented to the Western world and the naive tourists who fall for the con. The overwhelming majority of China's people live in abject poverty and perpetual oppression. Or are simply slaughtered.

At the end of the day, Communist is as Communist does.

Another quick data point reaffirming my thesis that the anti-gay policies of the world's two dominant bureaucratic religions, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, are driven by pandering to African homophobia:

Nigeria's Anglican church has deleted all references to the mother church in Britain from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism.

The Nigeria and Ugandan Anglican churches broke ties with the U.S. Episcopal Church over its 2003 consecration of a gay bishop living with a partner. A new dispute over same-sex unions in England has deepened divisions.

On Tuesday, a statement on the Nigerian church's Web site said that "all former references to 'communion with the see of Canterbury' were deleted" at a meeting last week. Instead, the constitution affirms ties with all churches that maintain the "faith, doctrine, sacrament and discipline of the one holy, Catholic and apostolic church."

The Anglican Church, being somewhat more decentralized than the Roman Catholic Church, faces greater internal discord like this, and will probably succumb to schism before the Catholic Church will. The Vatican, by contrast, has chosen not to accommodate the developed world, but rather to write it off wholesale. As the Great Boy-Rape Crisis illustrates, the Vatican simply doesn't care all that much what happens in America.

Two responses to the increasingly stark line between gay rights modernity and barbarism being drawn around the world, but in the end the same result is inevitable -- the collapse of authoritarian religion, at least in the Western world.

It can't happen fast enough.

To review: Under the Solomon Amendment, 10 U.S.C. 983, colleges and universities must grant military recruiters the same access as any other employer, or else risk losing all their federal funding. The threat applies to the entire institution, even if only one unit (e.g., the law school) attempts to bar military recruiters over its facially discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy barring gays from serving in uniform.

A major lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, Rumsfeld v. FAIR, will be argued before the Supreme Court in its upcoming term.

For whatever reason (i.e., Iraq), the military is not waiting for the final resolution of Rumsfeld v. FAIR and has a launched a pre-emptive strike against three law schools.

The interesting thing about this iteration of the funding threat is which schools the military is targeting — not Harvard, Yale or any other large, famous or rich law school, but three relatively small and obscure schools:

The Defense Department last week said that New York Law School is ineligible for federal funding because of the difficulties JAG recruiters have encountered trying to contact students on the school's campus, located in Manhattan. Military officials have also deemed Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vt., and William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., ineligible for federal funds.
...
Kent Greenfield, a Boston College law professor and president of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, a mostly anonymous coalition of law schools, said he thinks the Pentagon's enforcement of the law against the smaller schools may be a publicity stunt.

"They can pick off the Vermonts and William Mitchells of the world, and nobody will make a fuss," Greenfield told Inside Higher Ed, an online higher education news journal. "But I think the military knows better than to pick that fight [with Harvard]."

Indeed. Whatever happened to "pick on somebody your own size"? No pun intended, but the military shouldn't discriminate in its discrimination — either enforce Solomon or don't. But why replace what the military claims is a "reasoned" policy with one of petty bullying? It makes no sense — just like Don't Ask, Don't Tell makes no sense.

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Meanwhile, that shot across the law school bow has been heard by at least one objecting institution:

Harvard Law School will actively cooperate with military recruiters this fal